Study: Cancer patients' cost in lost hours at $2.3 billion

Published 6:30 am, Wednesday, January 3, 2007

WASHINGTON — The hours spent sitting in doctors' waiting rooms, in line for the CT scan, watching chemotherapy drip into veins: Battling cancer steals a lot of time — at least $2.3 billion worth in the first year of treatment alone.

So says the first study to try to put a price tag to the time that people spend being treated for 11 of the most common cancers.

Even more sobering than the economic toll are the tallies, by government researchers, of the sheer hours lost to cancer care: 368 hours in that first year after diagnosis with ovarian cancer; 272 hours being treated for lung cancer, 193 hours for kidney cancer.

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That doesn't count the days spent home in bed recovering from surgery or weak from chemo, just time spent actively getting care — chemo or radiation therapy, blood tests or cancer scans, surgery or checkups, driving to medical appointments and waiting your turn.

It's a study, to be published today in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, that sheds new light on the human costs of cancer.

"Cancer is more than just the dollars and cents for the medicines and the treatments and the doctors. It's also the lost opportunities for the patients," added Dr. Len Lichtenfeld of the American Cancer Society, who praised the research for attempting to quantify that often overlooked reality.

How much a disease costs society plays an important role in policymaking, such as how much to invest in medical research, but it's hard to calculate the value of a patient's time spent getting care.

Records studied

NCI epidemiologist
Robin Yabroff
and colleagues culled the records of 763,000 cancer patients covered by Medicare, the government's insurance program for those 65 and older, and estimated the time involved in traveling to, waiting for and receiving both in-hospital and outpatient care.

Although most of these patients were retired, the researchers assigned a monetary value to their time — $15.23 an hour, the median U.S. wage rate in 2002. Then they estimated the national toll by including the number of patients diagnosed with cancer in 2005.

It is almost certainly an underestimate, the researchers said, noting that younger cancer patients often receive more intensive treatment.

Whatever the dollar figure, the study shows something important to patients, Lichtenfeld noted: Early diagnoses require less treatment time, so investing in research for better early detection of cancer "has real benefits."